Читать книгу The Cruel Fire - Edward Atiyah - Страница 8

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Rosa was not surprised to see the village Greek Orthodox priest coming towards the house in the middle of the morning, accompanied by the boy who carried for him the little vessel of holy water with which he sprinkled benediction over the houses of the members of his flock, in return for a small contribution for the Church—which meant, as the parishioners knew, a present for himself. Rosa hurried to the drawer where she kept her purse, and took out a couple of twenty-five piastre notes—the equivalent of a shilling—which was the usual amount she gave for this unsolicited blessing. It was enough for the holy beggar—that and the cup of coffee she would have to make him!

Having equipped herself financially for the visit, she removed her apron, put a comb through her hair, and did some rapid tidying in the sitting-room. Then she went out to welcome the visitor, as he reached the garden gate. He was an elderly priest, with a greying beard; and he wore the long, black habit, black cloak and tall, black hat of his office; it was like a top-hat, but instead of a curving rim at the bottom, it had a short, flat rim at the top. The hem of his garment was grey with dust from his walk up the hillside.

“Welcome, welcome, Abuna,” said Rosa, opening the gate. “Good morning to you; do me the honour to come in.” She took his hand and kissed it.

“Good morning to you, and may God bless you, my daughter,” he said, coming in with his acolyte. “I hope I have not interrupted you in your work.”

“Abuna’s visit is always welcome, whatever it interrupts,” she said, leading him into the house and thinking that if he had come the day before, when her lover was there, the interruption would have been most abominable.

“You are very kind, my daughter,” he said, then, as they entered the hall, he turned to his water-carrier, took the small whisk from the vessel and sprayed a few drops of benediction in various directions, mumbling the appropriate formulas. Rosa took out her two twenty-five piastre notes and pushed them into the boy’s hand, as though they were a tip for him, whereas in fact all three of them knew that, by a polite convention, the poor lad acted only as a recipient for the priest.

When these formalities were over, Rosa ushered the priest into the sitting-room, and went into the kitchen to make him the customary cup of coffee. The boy sat out by himself on the terrace, eating an apple which Rosa had given him.

The priest had a delicate mission to carry out. He had not come merely for the fifty piastres Rosa had given him, but for another purpose as well. In her confessions to him Rosa had never mentioned anything about her lover; but rumours had reached him of late, and he had decided to convey a veiled warning to the erring woman. It was both in her interest and in his that he should do so. The more he knew about the secret weaknesses of his parishioners, and the more they knew that he knew, the greater would his power be over them, the more generous their donations to the Church. Father Boulos was not above a little indirect blackmail in such matters, but it had to be very indirect and delicately practised.

When Rosa came back with the coffee therefore he began by asking her the usual questions about the health and well-being of the family.

“As to health,” said Rosa, “they are all well, thank you, Abuna, and praise be to God. But you know what Faris is like. What shall I tell you?”

“You need not tell me anything, my daughter. I know what Faris is like. I know everybody and everything in this village.”

Rosa started slightly at the almost imperceptible stress he laid on the word “everything.”

“Of course, of course,” she said plaintively, deciding to ignore any possible innuendo and assume that Father Boulos was merely referring to her husband’s ill-treatment of her and the children. “You know all our secrets.”

“Does he still beat you?” asked the priest.

“He struck me in the face only yesterday morning. Look. Perhaps you can see the mark. But I don’t care about myself. It’s the children, the children, Abuna! He makes their life a misery. That’s why he struck me yesterday—because I was standing up for them. My heart bleeds at the way he treats them. He’s a tyrant. He has no love or mercy in his heart.”

“Never mind, my daughter. You must forgive him. It is his temper. God made him so, and we cannot understand the ways of God. But we must remember that we are all sinners and in need of God’s mercy. Every one of us is a sinner, is that not so?”

“Of course, Abuna,” she said, avoiding his eyes that were fixed on her significantly, while she looked down on the floor with an expression of conventional religious humility, as though merely acknowledging her share of the universal sinfulness of mankind. She still was not sure whether there was any hidden meaning in his words.

“I hear a lot about the unhappiness and the wickedness of people,” continued the priest, “not only from what my parishioners tell me about themselves in the confessional, but also from the gossip that goes on. In a small village like this there is much gossip. God preserve us from malicious tongues.”

“Amen,” said Rosa, still seemingly taking the priest’s remarks as expressions of general truths, but convinced now that he knew of her sin and was admonishing her in particular.

“The most important things in life,” exhorted Father Boulos, “are fear of God, and a good reputation. If Abu Mitry will not mend his ways, you have the satisfaction, at least, that you have never given him cause to ill treat you; and if your conscience is at peace, nothing else can really hurt you. God be with you, my daughter. I will have to leave you now.” He slapped his knees, with large and fleshy hands, as though spurring a mount, and prepared to rise.

“Just a moment, Abuna; you must take some of our grapes and apples; they’re the best we’ve ever had. I’ll fill you a small basket, and the boy can carry it for you and bring it back when you’ve emptied it.”

“Don’t trouble yourself,” he said, after Rosa’s retreating figure, and in a protest which he did not mean to be taken seriously. “I’ve got some in the house.”

Rosa came back with the basket of fruit, but knowing that Father Boulos preferred cash to presents in kind she pushed another twenty-five piastre note into the boy’s hand as he and his master were departing.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” said the priest. “You’ve already given him something.”

“Never mind,” said Rosa, full of amiability. “It isn’t every day I have the pleasure of seeing Abuna. You have honoured and blessed the house.” To herself, she thought: “Beggar and hypocrite!” as she stood watching him and the boy going down the hill. Who had told him? How had he come to know? She and Yusef had been lovers for two years now, and she had been so careful that she thought nobody knew about it. She was not afraid of Father Boulos. He would not say anything to her husband. A few piastres every now and then were enough to keep his mouth shut. Faris never gave him a bean. No, he wouldn’t tell on her. He was just giving her a friendly warning to put her under an obligation, so that she should give him a few extra piastres. She knew the old fox well enough. Holy man indeed! Nevertheless, what he had reported by his oblique remarks alarmed her. If people in the village—wicked, wicked gossips, what business was it of theirs?—were talking, Faris might pick up something, and then.... She must warn Yusef at once. Yusef had a silly, swaggering streak in his nature, and he drank. He might have said something incautious, perhaps boastful, when drinking with a friend.

Rosa took a red towel and went out into the garden. There, she placed the towel triangularly on the clothes line at a certain point. That was an agreed signal between her and her lover. Yusef would see it from his garage, and know what it meant. It meant Rosa wanted to see him urgently, but not in the house (the signal for the all-clear in the house was a blue towel); in such circumstances, they met in a derelict, half-finished house (whose owner had returned to South America to make enough money to complete it, but had not been heard of for many years) in the outskirts of the village. As soon as Yusef was able to leave the garage, after seeing the towel, he would sound three sharp hoots on an old motor horn which he kept in the garage specially for the purpose. Then Rosa would set out for the derelict house.

The signalling system having functioned successfully, Rosa and Yusef met half an hour later. She was the first to arrive, and when he came in, she said apprehensively:

“You made sure no one saw you enter?”

“Yes. What’s the matter? Anything happened? Has he struck you again, the beast?” He was about her own age, a little over forty, and not much taller; good-looking in a robust, undistinguished way, with ruddy cheeks and thick black hair; and his hands, in spite of the wash he had given them before leaving the garage, still bore the stains of engine oil.

“No; I wouldn’t call you out here in the middle of the morning just to tell you that.”

“Never mind what you called me for. Now that you’re here, I’m going to take what I want.” He smiled naughtily, taking her in his arms and pressing her close to him. “It does your looks good to be made love to. You looked fine yesterday, but to-day you are the queen of Lebanon! When can I come again to the house?”

“It seems you’re already coming too often.”

“What do you mean?”

She told him of the priest’s visit.

“I’ll pluck the old gossip’s beard if he doesn’t keep his mouth shut!” broke out Yusef, who had no more respect for the local clergy than Rosa, and who expressed his sentiments with the swagger which Rosa feared.

“He’ll keep it shut all right, but it means others are talking.”

“Who’s talking? Let me know who it is, and I’ll give him such a bleeding mouth that he’ll never be able to talk again.”

“And much good that’ll do us. The whole village would know then.”

“Well, let them know; let them talk. They all know the beast beats you. Let them know you’re having your revenge on him.” His voice dropped its defiant swagger and became softly amorous, seductive, as he lifted her skirt and began caressing her thighs. They were now sitting on a long stone which had been left lying on the floor of the half-finished room. A few thorny plants grew around it from the untiled floor.

“We must talk of serious things just now,” she said, but without attempting to arrest the progress of his caresses. “You must be very discreet, Yusef!”

“But I am discreet. Why, when we meet in the village, I pretend not to see you.”

“It’s not your eyes I’m afraid of; it’s your tongue. Have you told anyone about us? Any of your friends?”

“I swear by the bones of my father and mother not a word has come out of my lips.”

“Not when you’re sober, but you can’t always be sure what you say when you’re drinking with your friends, and they start talking of Faris and of how cunning and astute he is, and of how everybody fears him in the village, and of how he underpaid you for the lorry he hired from you for the transport of the grain; you might be tempted to let drop some word.”

“No, no, my heart. Never fear.”

“I’m not afraid on my own account; I don’t fear him and I can look after myself all right. But I fear for you, my love. Faris might do something dreadful to you if he came to hear anything.”

“If you can look after yourself, so can I. I am stronger than he is, if it comes to a fight. I’ll knock him down in the middle of the market place. I’ll kill him!”

“And be hanged for it or go to prison for the rest of your life?”

“Not if he attacks me. But you don’t have to worry about it Rosa; he will never come to know anything. Nobody will tell him; they all hate him.”

“Exactly. Someone may tell him just out of hatred, to humiliate him. Besides, it isn’t only Faris I’m thinking of; I don’t want the children to hear anything.”

“But who will tell them? People are sorry for them because they have such a bad father.”

“You never know. If Mitry or Antoine quarrels with somebody, if a girl becomes jealous of Genevieve, they might easily try to insult them—say, ‘Go and see what your mother is doing,’ or ‘Who are you to talk to people like that when your mother is not a respectable woman?’ ”

“They wouldn’t dare; they would have me to answer to then. I’d break the jaw of anyone who said that.”

“But they would be right,” she said, changing her tone from the warning to the penitential. “I am not a respectable woman, am I?” She looked down on her exposed thighs and on his hand that was sweeping them languorously.

“Oh, Rosa,” he said, “you are a beautiful and lovely woman.”

“Go on with you. I’m no longer young; I have three grown up children.”

“And you have thighs like the full-blown inner tube of a car tyre—just as firm and smooth and beautifully rounded! Oh, if he would only die, we could get married, Rosa, and be together always, and do this every day, every day.”

“He won’t die. The likes of him never do. He will live to bury us all; so you must be very careful, my love.”